Road trip from Coober Pedy to Apatula, SA-NT

It's funny how the weather can affect things while travelling, either the best-laid plans get thrown out the window and you’ll head home, or you simply just change plans like in our case. Our base to explore was the unique outback town of Coober Pedy in South Australia. Known as Australia’s opal mining capital with underground buildings, a landscape full of mole hills and mines, it needs to be visited at least once on anyone’s travel itinerary.

History states that about 150 million years ago, inland Australia was covered by a vast ocean and when it started to dry up, the water and silica seeped in to the earth’s cracks and fault lines. Over time, chemical reactions happened, opals were formed, and in 1915 the first opals were found by Willie Hutchinson. Today, Coober Pedy’s many mines produce 85 per cent of the world’s most stunning opals ... and they say, if you can’t find colour here, you’re not looking.

The word got out and a year later, miners rushed the area and established a town. Today, it’s a busy place offering plenty of opportunities to explore the dugouts and mines. In fact, records show there are about 260,000 shafts across the local landscape. Around 50 per cent of the townsfolk live underground due to the extreme temperatures in summer, and interestingly there are more than 40 different nationalities making up the population.

59

The town has the usual and unusual tourist attractions with plenty of opal shops, a grassless golf course, mine tours, an underground church, motels, plus if you’re a tent camper you can set it up underground at Riba’s Underground Camping & Caravan Park. Originally named Stuart Range, it was officially changed to Coober Pedy by the local Progress and Miners Association in 1920.

It’s thought that the name Coober Pedy is derived from what the local Aborigines saw as strange activity of ‘white men down holes’. Natural attractions surround the town and include the stunning The Breakaways (ranges) to the northeast and out to Lake Cadibarrawirracanna (the longest lake name in Australia) to the east in the Woomera area.

59

Take an underground mine tour and learn how the locals look for opals

With low rainfall, the town pumps its water from a deep artesian bore 25km away, after attempts by the government to establish several local water sources failed. The first program was to build a 2-million-litre tank underground but it was deemed unreliable, then in 1967 a desal’ plant was built to treat salty water pumped from 100m below ground but it didn’t produce enough to supply the whole town.

The Stuart Highway runs through Cooper Pedy and from here are opportunities to explore the desert regions to the east towards the famous Oodnadatta Track, and our plan was to head along Kempe Road towards Oodnadatta. Now while Kempe Rd may seem ‘just’ another desert dirt road, the scenery is pretty mind blowing. There are miles and miles of treeless plains for as far as the eye can see, and with shimmering masses of gypsum popping out of the ground, it’s a sight to behold. But combined with the rocky gibber plains, there’s not much life out here or fun during the warmer months. It’s hard to imagine the early explorers trudging through here looking for water or shade back in the late 1880s, when at times their convoys could only travel up to 20 miles a day.

59

Pink Roadhouse

The Pink Roadhouse at Oodnadatta is an Aussie icon, if not for the massive burgers just visiting it is another must. Most know the roadhouse for being painted all pink and from the circular road signs made by Adam Plate (and his wife Lynnie). Tragically, Adam passed away but his legacy lives on at the roadhouse and indeed along the Oodnadatta Track. For those that don’t know, Adam cut the tops off of old 44-gallon drums, painted them pink and put interesting facts on them – before placing them along the track.

The Oodnadatta Track covers 620km between Marla in the north to Marree in the south, and is packed with history – it’s best to do the whole track from start to finish to explore all of the heritage and unique features along the way. Before Europeans started to explore the area and indeed start using the track, it was an ancient ochre trading route used by Aboriginals going from waterhole to waterhole. Explorers used the route to head north to the Gulf, in fact it’s roughly the route taken by explorer John Stuart on his third expedition in 1859 and before the Overland Telegraph was built where nearly 33,000 poles lined the way from Adelaide northward to Darwin.

59

Oodnadatta has several restored buildings, an explorers and pioneers park, while the old railway station is now the museum and is free to enter.

It was in 1890 that Oodnadatta was proclaimed a town and during that time millions of acres were taken up as pastoral leases. By the end of 1891, the railway line had come to town from Warrina in the south making Oodnadatta the end of the line, and it was around this time that the tough and amazing Afghans moved in to the area. With their knowledge of harsh desert life as nomadic travellers they were soon moving mail, freight and the odd passenger northwards to Alice Springs with their camel teams. This lasted for a good 30 years until the railway line was extended north phasing out the teams. Their legacy still lives on with monuments throughout the area, descendants and other related history.

59

After spending a few hours at Oodnadatta, our plan was to head up through the remote Witjira National Park on the western edge of the Simpson Desert via Mount Dare. Recent rainfall though, still had this area closed off to all travellers and the only option was to head up the track to Marla on the Stuart Highway, some 210km away. Although the Oodnadatta Track needs to be treated with respect due to its remote location, more often than not the road is in pretty good condition, as long as you drive accordingly.

Prior to our camp at Coober Pedy we spent time on the southern end of the Oodnadatta Track exploring the railway heritage ruins that have easy access. Some worth a mention include the Curdimurka Siding dating back to 1888 where most of the buildings, water tank, desalination boiler and the 433m-long plate girder bridge can be viewed, thankfully all listed on the Heritage Register. In 1943, a Kennecott lime-soda plant was built to deal with the high minerals in the water that was needed for the locomotives. It seems like this siding was in the middle of nowhere but the settlers made it home until 1980 when the last Ghan train went through. Along most of the Oodnadatta Track are plenty of ruins to be viewed, sadly some have been vandalised.

59

Hitting Marla and the straight Stuart Highway, we headed north towards the Northern Territory and just 20km over the border we pulled in to Kulgera Roadhouse for fuel and to gain current road conditions as we wanted to head east from here. According to Kulgera, they had received no rain and it had only passed across the nearby Stanley Tableland. With changed plans, we again hit the sandy surfaces along the Finke Road, as the destination for the night was within the Newland Ranges and the official ‘Centre of Australia’.

The road to the Lambert Centre of Australia is only 12km but was extremely chopped up taking nearly an hour, dodging severe washouts and battling endless corrugations. This is now known as the true centre of Australia after many others claimed to have found it. Even explorer Stuart claimed he worked it out but unfortunately his was hundreds of miles away. Explorer Dr Cecil Madigan, who in 1930 used a crude metal cut-out of Australia was closer, just 11km away.

Finally in 1988, the exact position was determined by the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia after plotting more than 25,000 points around our coastline, and now on the exact spot is a replica of the flagpole that sits on top of Parliament House.

59

Finke

After heading back out to Finke Rd, it’s another hour of travel passing by the Beddome Range before entering the cultural town of Apatula (formerly Finke). It’s here we jumped back to our original plan to follow the Old Ghan railway line 180km to Alice Springs. The well-signposted Old Ghan Railway Heritage Trail runs loosely along and beside the old railway line. Although the track has been pulled up when it was moved farther west, there’s still plenty to explore along the way, as well as dodging the numerous metal spikes left on the ground from the old line.

A four-wheel drive is definitely recommended as the road is mostly unmaintained with rough sections, miles of horrid corrugations, narrow cuttings and of course, desert sand. The Old Ghan trail runs beside the Finke Desert Race track which in parts, wasn’t as rough as the main track.

59

On the Finke Road

Along the way are several places of interest to stop at right on the old railway line, where relics from the past lie, the buildings still stand and informative information boards tell the story behind what once was. Engoordina is the first visible stop and was the base for maintenance crew number 22 servicing the line.

When the war effort was on, men left here for better pay and the government ran adverts calling for more workers to maintain the line across the flat ranges, through desert oak fields and the rolling sand hills of Finke. The only thing left here now are roofless buildings of the workers’ quarters, the interiors of which have piles of sand blown in from harsh storms. A few relics lie outside and there’s plenty of graffiti on the walls.

59

Passing through on Old Ghan railway cutting on Finke Rd

Farther along, the huge water tank at Bundooma stands out against the sand dunes and desert trees. Another hour up the track is Rodinga, which is Aboriginal for foot or road; and again, the ruins here are just roofless buildings where workers made camp out of the harsh weather that this area can have, and was the second-last siding before Alice Springs. The storyboards beside the buildings (both here and Engoordina) tell of the hardship and history of the line and of course, personal stories.

Although the weather may have upset our direct travel plans, the diversions we had to make were pretty cool, exploring the heritage and ticking more off our bucket list.

59

Five Finke-trip favourites

1. Opal capital of the world

Supplying most of the world’s gem-quality opals, Coober Pedy is an interesting place to visit, where a lot of the population live underground to escape the scorching summer desert heat. It’s said that your average ‘three-bedroom cave’ known as a ‘dugout’, costs the same as an above-ground house, but without the cost of running air-con. The local landscape is pockmarked with more than 260,000 mine shafts and entrances, and is not the place to wander around in the dark.

2. Apatula/Finke

The remote indigenous NT community of Apatula (previously known as Finke) is 139km east of the Kulgera Roadhouse, south of Alice Springs. It has steadily grown in sporting notoriety as the target point of the Finke Desert Race from Alice Springs, Australia’s premier off-road event. Once known as Finke Siding when the Central Australia Railway pushed through around 1925, Apatula today holds on to its former railway heritage as a point of interest along the Old Ghan Railway Heritage Trail. Oh, and it’s also the farthest populated area from the sea in Australia, while the nearby ephemeral Finke River is said to be oldest river in the world.

3. Geographic centre of Australia

Also close to Apatula is the Lambert Centre of Australia monument, representing the geographic centre of the Australian continent. Named in honour of Dr Bruce Lambert, a UN expert on geodesy and cartography, the monument is a scaled-down replica of the flagpole design that sits atop Australia’s Parliament House in Canberra.

59

4. Oodnadatta Track

It’s roughly a 200km trip from Coober Pedy to Oodnadatta and it’s famous namesake Track that runs 620km from Marree to Marla (on the Stuart Highway). Doing the track has become a sort of ‘rite of passage’ for serious 4WD tourers to tackle at least once in a lifetime. The Track follows a traditional Aboriginal trading route, with Oodnaddatta a major rail head on the Old Ghan train line to Alice Springs. Highlights along the way include The Pink Roadhouse, of course.

5. Chasing trains

The Old Ghan Railway Heritage Trail spans 1300km from Quorn in South Australia to Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. For our journey we linked up with the Trail at Oodnadatta, and again at Apatula/Finke after detouring via the Kulgera Roadhouse on the Stuart Highway. Passing through on Old Ghan railway cutting on Finke Rd.